A new study by researchers at the University of Warwick investigates the relationship between Donald Trump’s tweets and anti-Muslim hate crime—with sobering results for social media optimists.
Read more
Editors’ Briefing: This Week in Political Economy (May 19–26)
Trump signs the largest rollback of financial regulations since the 2008 crisis into law; Zuckerberg masterfully evades the questions of European parliamentarians; Amazon has developed a “powerful and dangerous” new facial recognition system; and why don’t health insurers mind big hospital bills?
Read more
Google and Facebook’s “Kill Zone”: “We’ve Taken the Focus Off of Rewarding Genius and Innovation to Rewarding Capital and Scale”
A Stigler Center panel explores the implications of tech giants’ dominance on innovation and startups.
Read more
Editors’ Briefing: This Week in Political Economy (May 4–May 12)
A whistleblower alleges fraud in the audits of Silicon Valley companies; AT&T acknowledges that hiring Michael Cohen was a “bad mistake”; new analysis finds that Amazon has not been consistent with the stated selection criteria for HQ2; and a majority of Americans back a constitutional amendment that would outlaw Citizens United. This week in political economy.
Read more
“In 10 Years, the Surveillance Business Model Will Have Been Made Illegal”
The opening panel of the Stigler Center’s annual antitrust conference discussed the source of digital platforms’ power and what, if anything, can be done to address the numerous challenges their ability to shape opinions and outcomes present.
Read more
Glen Weyl: “The Very Structure of Capitalism Is Inherently Monopolistic”
In an interview with ProMarket, Glen Weyl, co-author of the wildly ambitious (and wildly controversial) new book Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society, talks about antitrust, data as labor, and why he thinks the free market system is not actually free. “The entire business community has been speaking with one voice in the common interest of capital as a class,” he says.
Read more
Editors’ Briefing: This Week in Political Economy (April 28–May 4)
George Mason University faces controversy over its relationship with donors; the former CEO of Volkswagen is charged in relation to the company’s diesel emissions cheating scandal; and are Google and Facebook already trying to undermine Europe’s new privacy rules?
Read more
Luigi Zingales Proposes Creation of Interdisciplinary Committee on Digital Platforms Regulation
The Committee on Internet Platforms Regulation, proposed Zingales would be comprised of academics and experts on the industry.
Read more
Data Workers of the World, Unite!
With solutions to the threats of digital monopolies currently looking unlikely to come from the state, law and economics scholars Eric Posner and Glen Weyl, authors of the forthcoming book Radical Markets, propose looking to the power of organized labor. A data workers’ (that is, social media users’) labor union, they argue, could help check the offenses of the digital platforms.
Read more
Former Italian PM and European Competition Commissioner Mario Monti: Why Antitrust Enforcement Is “More Vigorous” in Europe Than in the US
Why is Europe so much more vigorous than the US when it comes to antitrust enforcement? In an interview with ProMarket, Monti, who served as the EU’s Competition Commissioner between 1999 and 2004, offers a possible explanation: American antitrust’s sensitivity to election outcomes and industry lobbying.
Read more
DOJ Antitrust Chief Makan Delrahim: “American Antitrust Agencies Likely Have Made More Enforcement Mistakes Than Any of Their Foreign Counterparts”
In a keynote address at the Stigler Center’s Antitrust and Competition: Digital Platforms and Concentration conference, the US Department of Justice’s Assistant Attorney General said antitrust enforcers “should be open and receptive to empirical evidence that companies in digital markets may be engaging in predatory pricing or other exclusionary conduct to drive out competition and cause long-run harm to consumers” and said his own thinking on data has changed.
Read more
Platforms and Adjacent Market Competition: A Look at Recent History
Chapter 7 of our Digital Platforms and Concentration conference ebook looks at some critical junctures in the history of competition between Big Tech companies and explores how, even when regulators have detected anticompetitive behavior, the remedies they’ve imposed have done little to solve the problem.
Read more